


Melee

by containsquinine



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Arthur has issues too but they're not graphic, Bulimia, Eames is bulimic, Eating Disorders, Self-Hatred, five times Eames bullshitted his way out and one time he didn't, idk these tags are rough
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 03:17:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18460370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/containsquinine/pseuds/containsquinine
Summary: Five times Eames was reckless and one time Arthur told the truthWarning: Potentially triggering, heed the tags





	Melee

**Author's Note:**

> These headcanons for the two of them Refuse to leave me alone so here we are

i. 

The first time Arthur catches him purging, they are in Bangkok and it’s the hottest red curry he has ever eaten. It burns twice as much coming up as it did going down and the burn makes his eyes stream. When he stands up and comes around the barrier that separates the toilet from the sink, Arthur is leaning against the door to the bathrooms. Arthur smirks at his rumpled collar and bloodshot eyes like he’s never seen anything funnier in his life. Eames glares at him as moves to wash his hands and wipe his mouth.

“Never had real curry before?” Arthur asks, that smirk thick in his voice like cream. 

Eames bites back the retort sitting on his tongue. He thinks furiously for a moment and decides to seize the way out Arthur just gave him. 

“I guess it just doesn’t agree with me,” Eames manages with an easy smile. 

Arthur snorts and then melts away, leaving Eames to rinse his mouth out with shaking hands, adrenaline thundering through his body, heartbeat pulsing in his empty stomach. 

He adds ‘red curry’ to the list of bad-to-purge items and adds Arthur to the list of people he needs to keep an eye on. 

 

ii. 

The second time Arthur catches him, he can feel Arthur’s gaze stretch over his body, weighted, searching, suspicious. 

It’s been 15 months since they last worked together, and Eames had all but forgotten the red curry incident. It’s not until he is in the bathroom of the flat they are using as quarters for the new job, rooting around under the sink for a place to hide his glock, when he tilts wrong and activates his gag reflex. 

He barely manages to kick the door shut behind him before he is choking up his stomach lining into the toilet. Eames hopes the plashing can be mistaken for running water, and when he heaves himself empty, he turns for the faucet only to find Arthur in the doorway, watching him with those dark eyes of his. 

Something in Arthur’s gaze makes the hair on the back of Eames’ neck stand up; his whole body screaming ‘warning’ before he remembers why. It’s the image of Arthur there that floods him with déjà vu, a hazy memory from Bangkok thrown into sharp relief in his mind. Eames’ brain kicks into overdrive, running rat mazes toward escape. 

Eames’ face burns red, but he moves to the sink to rinse his mouth out anyway. His throat hurts, really hurts, and Eames knows his face is puffy. He needs to take it easy, and had been. He had been taking it easy. Damn this body. 

“Are you sick?” Arthur asks. 

Eames coughs gently. “Maybe just a touch,” he says, and winces when his voice comes out rough. 

Arthur wrinkles his nose, and Eames nearly laughs at his delicacy. If only Arthur knew just exactly what he does. That would get more than a wrinkled nose from him. The urge to just say it brims up in him fast and sharp, like he drank a flute of champagne too fast and left the bubbles to batter his sternum from the inside out. It might be nice to shock Arthur out of his coat of ice, but now isn’t the time. When somebody graciously supplies you with an excuse, you take it. 

“Can you work?” 

Eames nods, Arthur leaves, and Eames mentally adds a second tally to Arthur’s name on the list. 

 

iii. 

The third time, Arthur doesn’t so much catch him as Eames gives himself away. 

The team is out celebrating a successful job completed for the monarch of a small European country. They are safe after driving to a different, equally small European country where they can be anonymous. Eames, as usual, goes too far. They gamble and he wins. Because he wins he lets himself drink. And he is a hungry drunk. But he won—they won—so why shouldn’t he eat? Why shouldn’t he? He is down a couple of stone, and unless he is mistaken, Yusuf was checking out his ass earlier. He isn’t too puffy, his glands aren’t swollen. He can eat. 

So he does. He does eat. There is crusty bread, soft cheese, pickled peppers, and stuffed vine leaves. There are small tarts and small pies and fresh fish that tastes of brine. The brine mixes easily with the fruit, and Eames is hungry. So hungry. 

Eames is happy, until he looks up while sucking the mingled flavors of the sea and sun-ripened fruit from a finger and looks directly into Arthur’s eyes. Arthur is staring right at him, lips parted, an unreadable expression on his face. The happiness evaporates and is replaced with revulsion at how he must look in Arthur’s eyes, revulsion at allowing himself. He immediately stands. 

“Something wrong?” Yusuf asks, Eames’ sudden movement startling him. 

“Yes. No. I just, shouldn’t have,” Eames stammers, gesturing vaguely at the table, the decimated plates. Only animals should be able to eat so much. 

Yusuf’s eyebrows knit and Eames can feel Arthur watching him, always watching him. Eames bolts. He darts down a few streets, melee in his pulse, kicking up so fast the fog of alcohol burns out of his mind. The streets, houses mostly made of white stone, slip past his vision as he runs, nearly unseeing, his self hatred threatening to drag him under completely.

He wants it out of him, all of it. The food, the drink, the aching hunger, the recklessness, the impulse. Always, always the impulse, since he was young, since he was born, hands moving like the stuffed arms of a marionette, a throat that won’t listen to him. Always, always the hunger: implacable, unslakable—hip flasks of sea water on the deck of a becalmed ship. Don’t do it Eames, memories of a thousand voices echoing the phrase at him, but when did he listen? When has he ever listened? How could he have let himself go, with Arthur there? Arthur already thinks him a lush, already sees him as out of control, a filthy glutton. 

Eames forces himself to stop running, overly full stomach protesting loudly. He leans against a wall, hidden just inside the mouth of an alley that smells like waste. He has a suspicion Arthur may try and follow him, so he fights the urge and waits. But after five or so minutes nobody comes, and why would they, honestly. He steps further into the alley, leans over, and sticks two fingers in his mouth for the familiarity of it, not because he needs to. His gag reflex is already shot, his hands are already scarred. His body will fail him soon. It doesn’t matter. 

When he is done, he turns around to find his miserable way back to the hostel, and freezes. Arthur is standing in the mouth of the alley, hands slack against his sides, staring at Eames like he’s just found the meaning to every word Stephen Hawking ever wrote. 

Eames feels it, low in his belly, high in his chest that he's been caught for the final time. 

“What is going on?” Arthur asks, voice flinty, incongruous to the look on his face. 

“Too much to drink,” Eames says easily. He tries to push past Arthur, but Arthur moves to block him. 

“Bullshit,” Arthur spits. “You’re down at least twenty pounds.” Arthur moves toward him, and Eames has a fleeting, horrified thought that Arthur will put his hands on him and feel exactly how disgusting he is.

Eames steps back from Arthur and draws himself up, looks into Arthur’s eyes. 

“Do me a favor, darling, and stop pretending you give a shit,” Eames says. 

Arthur goes still with shock, allowing Eames to slip away from him. They don’t see each other again for a year. 

 

iv. 

The fourth time, Arthur doesn’t say anything. 

Eames starts to wonder if Arthur is getting off on this—seeing him broken, filthy, exhausted. Arthur wonders if he knows the depths of what he is seeing, the self-hatred. The years of it, of cycling and the itch he can’t get rid of. The way he can’t stop his arms from working sometimes, can’t stop his mouth from swallowing. He wonders if Arthur knows, and decides he can’t. 

Eames tastes like bile and smells like it too. He looks bad again, pants too loose, skin sallow. He can’t sleep flat without a flood of acid rushing up from inside him like the river Styx, and Eames tries to visualize the worn out sphincters leading down his throat. Eames can barely keep down water, and that’s how Arthur finds him, on his knees and slung over the lip of the tub, water rushing in the basin to cover up the noises he makes. Arthur places a flannel next to him and leaves. 

It seems like a lot of effort to go through; Eames knows he locked the door.

On the job, Eames’ forgeries are flawless. They part ways without speaking, all notions of team celebrations lost. 

 

v. 

The last time, Eames collapses in the bathroom on a job. Later, he will wonder at the humiliation of Arthur breaking into the bathroom with the shower drain still sucking away his breakfast, Eames wet and naked and weak. He doesn’t recall it though, and for that he is grateful. Eames doesn’t remember Arthur breaking the door down, doesn’t remember Arthur tearing the shower curtain. He didn’t hear Arthur yelling, didn’t hear the way his voice cracked when Eames would not wake.

Eames comes to in hospital, swathed in white. There are thick tubes in his arms, dripping what must be saline. He moves and there’s another one down his throat and before he knows what he is doing he’s gagging, he can’t breathe, and he fights it, fights, even as everything goes black. 

.

 

When Eames wakes up again the tube down his nose is gone, and there is a thick tube near his collarbones, forcing thick, pale yellow liquid into his body. It hurts. He hears voices, somebody shouting. 

“—what you were even thinking, using an NG tube on a bulimic, are you stupid, or just bad at your job?” A part of his brain sighs at Arthur’s tirade. It is lovely to not be on the receiving end of that wrath. 

Eames hears another voice, quieter, placating, and then Arthur again, “I don’t give a fuck.” 

The door to his room opens shortly thereafter and admits Arthur, who looks furiously pressed in his suit, lines sharp enough to make Eames tired. He smells like coffee. 

“You’re awake.” Arthur says. 

“It appears that way, yes,” Eames says, voice coming out in a low croak. He winces. 

Arthur stands above him, arms crossed, and glares. 

“Do you have anything to say?” Arthur finally asks. 

Eames shrugs. 

“Fine,” Arthur says, and picks up his medical chart. “When I brought you in here—because you were unresponsive and unconscious, by the way—you were severely dehydrated, bradycardic, and hypotensive. Your adrenals are shot, as is your gag reflex. Your stomach lining shows signs of necrosis in places, your esophagus is thinned and susceptible to rupture, should your purging continue. The stomach acid has eaten away at your teeth and soft palate. Your electrolytes are all over the place as well, which is causing an irregular heartbeat that I am sure you noticed, but did not say anything about. Does that all sound about right?” Arthur says, voice icy. 

Eames looks at Arthur, worlds away in his suit, pressed and vicious and orderly little boxes, orderly little charts, to do lists Eames makes but cannot check off. 

“Don’t preach to me, darling. You don’t understand.” 

Arthur sets the chart down, movements rigid, and Eames gets the feeling he has made a mistake. 

“Don’t understand? I don’t understand.” Arthur repeats flatly. He snaps the chart back onto the counter at the end of the hospital bed and glares at him, baring his teeth. Eames doubts he knows he is doing it. He’s never seen Arthur this close to losing it. Arthur pulls something from his pocket, a small leather bound notebook Eames has never seen before, and whips it at Eames. It smacks him in the chest, after he utterly fails to try and catch it. 

“You tell me what I don’t understand Mr. Eames.” And then Arthur is gone. 

. 

The notebook is a log, organized by day. There are five columns: weight, food eaten, calories consumed, calories burned, days binge free. The days when ‘calories burned’ total more than ‘calories consumed’ are marked with a star. The days where the reverse is true are highlighted in pink. The first of every month has another chart as well, one with measurements, compared with goals. 

It’s horrifying and hard to look at. The log goes back a couple of years, the notebook stuffed full with spidery handwriting, self-deprecating notes, sometimes a small paragraph of vicious, vitriolic prose inked under the week’s table. Eames doubts it is the first or only of its kind, and he shudders to think of a small line of notebooks, leather bound proof of Arthur’s self-hatred, hiding under his bed, needling him in the dark, pricking him full of holes. 

Eames sees it easily, now that he is looking. 

Of course, Eames thinks, and he has to hold back his hysterical laugh. They’re prototypical. Arthur, Type A, controlling, the classic perfectionist. And himself, doomed to fall short of his goals and remain in the normal range, for everybody who isn’t looking, for everybody who thinks salivary glands should be hard and the size of walnuts. He can’t control himself and Arthur cannot do anything but. Of course. 

He laughs then, laughs until tears stream down his eyes. Arthur doesn’t come back to the hospital. He gets discharged and sent to a nutritionist. 

 

+1 

Dom comes and finds him in Mombassa, worlds away, hot and sticky, to ask him about Inception. He’s put on weight, but his salivary glands are down and he can sleep again, so Eames thinks it may not be the worst thing in the world. He palms the notebook of Arthur’s in his jacket and sips his drink. 

That night they eat red curry and fly back to Paris, to Arthur. 

It’s been almost two years. Arthur looks good, less bristled and ready to snap. He is still lean though, and Eames wonders if there is a notebook on him right now that matches the one in Eames’ pocket. 

Arthur treats him brusquely, but not harshly, and when they get a moment alone Eames slips the notebook to him on his desk. Sitting next to Arthur’s other notebooks, he is horrified to see that it’s obvious Eames has had the notebook on him this whole time. 

Arthur raises an eyebrow at him. “Did you sleep with it?” 

Eames fights down his blush. “Just about. Thank you for sharing with me.” 

“I do understand,” Arthur says. Eames raises his own eyebrow at that. Arthur shrugs. “Or at least, I understand some.” 

“You look good Arthur,” Eames says, and is pleased by the smooth tenor of his voice, not cracked from bile. 

“Not as good as you,” Arthur replies in a hush, sincerity written plainly on his face. Eames ducks away, cowed by Arthur’s approval, and devotes himself entirely to finishing the job. 

When they land in the airport, Eames hails a cab and Arthur crams himself into the back with him before he can shut the door. Arthur is nearly half on top of him, Eames too stunned to move when Arthur’s hands slip against his chest briefly as Arthur deposits the notebook back into Eames’ coat pocket. They stare at each other silently.

Finally Arthur asks, “Do you want to get a drink with me?” 

Eames can’t do anything but nod.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I've taken ~liberties and yes I know you can use an NG tube on a patient with bulimia. All inaccuracies are mine.


End file.
